Tederick.com: October 2008 Archives
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This has been a rough week. Not bad, not good, just rough - crises and explosions and affirmations and kinship. Pulling closer. 2009 is going to be a big year, and lines are starting to form now which tell me a bit about what's going to be up for decision, and when, and by who. And even if the calendars don't roll over until Jan 1, it feels like '09 started sometime in the past few days. I wrote in my journal: "Really? This is my life?"
Photography by Cannobo le Bobo
Maybe it's not my place to say, but there's something disastrously funny about watching this reporter presume Joaquin Phoenix is completely full of shit when the actor announces that he's giving up acting in order to pursue that oh-so-artistic musical career we've all heard about.
Droolworthy, one: Sam Mendes will direct Preacher.
Droolworthy, two: Mark Millar's neck-to-nuts 10,000-year Superman trilogy. I mean I like Bryan Singer, but DAMN.
Finally, this Mamo goes down like a well-poured scotch.
I closed an email to a friend of mine with that line a few years ago, and it has lingered in my mind since as the moment where I inadvertently defined my entire personality.
So I've been fairly successful in the no-coffee thing. The real goal (at least for now) has been to stop having a Starbizzle on my way to work every day, which was the main source of my environmental worry, and which proved surprisingly easy. I had a couple cups on the weekend and one over dinner last Thursday night, but that's about it... sure, it almost certainly contributed to the headache from hell (even my doctor commented on the boldness of my timing choices) but whaddayagonnado.
Meanwhile, as the world adjusts slowly to the environmental apocalypse, the economic one continues apace: I bought something for my apartment today - the piece de resistance, really - and was smartly slapped in the face with how meteorically the Canadian dollar has fallen in the past month. My last Amazon order went in with the dollar in the mid-to-low nineties... and now, a forty dollar auction cost me sixty damn bucks. It's like 1992 all over again! Oh well. I cancelled my pre-order on blu-ray Firefly, and died inside a little bit.
Somehow, Superman and Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves slipped under my gaze. But no longer. It's quite rare that four awesome things end up in the same title.
So after a six and a half year self-imposed protest strike against the entire dental industry, I went to the dentist today. I would like to dedicate my return to Marilyn, the horrifying telemarketer-cum-receptionist who valiantly worked the phones from 7:30 a.m. till close to midnight, Monday through Sunday, 365 days a year at my former dentist's office. At the new place, I got a substantial layer of crap taken off my teeth, but on the whole fared pretty well for someone who hadn't engaged in dentistry since he moved out of Mommy and Daddy's house. This is because I have Great Teeth. Nigh on indestructible, they are. In spite of that, I had a wee cavity, which I had them fill, and now all's back to normal. I'll visit again in 2015, wearing vacuum-sealed high-tops and carrying my hoverboard under my arm.
Over in the real world (I call it: "Ontario"), cell phones + driving = illegal, which dismays me only in that our species apparently needs laws for this sort of thing, instead of figuring that, say, typing an email while driving might be slightly Darwinism-worthy. But then, we're the ones who forked over enough money to guarantee a sequel to The Da Vinci Code. So we get what we get.
Go Chris Nolan go. You've got my vote for Genius.
To briefly continue my pre-stated Ebert crush, the fella put into words on his blog what I've been noticing all of this year: since the loss of his voice, that man's writing (which didn't suck to begin with, by the way) has fucking skyrocketed in quality. It's sort of amazing, sort of beautiful, sort of sad. I guess it's just the way things go, but it makes me think a lot about what I'm doing, and what I'm writing, and what happens upon the redirection of rivers.
Not merely to draw attention to how cool I am - though I am cool - but I am now reading Bat-Manga!, which was a gift from Matty Price, and is magnificent. It has all the tropes of the 60s Batman TV series and the assorted Godzilla variations, i.e. there's still Clay-Face but now Clay-Face turns into a giant pterodactyl to fight Batman. At long last, we have discovered the road Chris Nolan should take in forging Batman Begins Some'Third. Batman in Japan! Japan-Batman! Bat-Japan-Man! They already crossed the Joker with Ichi the Killer, now imagine if they crossed the Riddler with the fuckin' Bugmaster? Well, had him played by Tadanobu Asano anyway. I'd watch that guy do anything. Domo. Domo arigato.
The thing I've been writing of late, a piddling 6-page 2-hander called Guy in the Sky, actually got taken to what I'd call a nearly successful half-assed draft yesterday, which means that I should write it at least twice more, but that if I do so, it might not suck. So that's something.
Sherwood Park, October 25 2008
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
Many moons ago - or, apparently, pretty much exactly one year back - I visited Egg Cetera in Guelph, and found so many bennies on their menu that I fairly well had no choice but to go back. Well, then Home Fries moved outta the Goo and it all went to hell, until today: me and HF made a special pilgrimage back to Guelph to, uh, do stuff, and we hit Egg Cetera on the way out of town.
The menu continues to offer a stunning overwhelm of benny variations, making it initially challenging to pick one from among the multitude. I finally settled on the Pancake Benny, and Home Fries went for the Mexican Benny. Mexican Benny adds cheese, adds guac, adds hot peppers. Pancake Benny, meanwhile, loses the English muffin, loses the ham, and adds SOME FUCKING PANCAKES. Holy sweet doodly pop, that's nearly preternatural symmetry with my darkest, most fervent wishes. I mean, some days, I just wake up wanting pancakes. (Some days, some midnights, some middle of the afternoons...) But it is rare that I get within striking distance of a brunching establishment without also wanting a benny. At Egg Cetera, it all came true for me.
I was initially trepidatious about this - as you can see in the photo above, the meal comes with maple syrup, which is probably expected given the situation, but after the McGriddle fiasco of 2003, I wasn't particularly up with the notion of tossing syrup on my pancakey, Hollandaisey eggs and living with the consequences. Fortunately, though, no McGriddlish disasters took place. Pancake, when taken under egg and Hollandaise, tastes like turkey. The best turkey dinner you've ever had, with stuffing, lots of gravy, and cranberry sauce. And then when you've finished up all the egg and sauce that's been afforded you, the maple syrup is there to help you enjoy the pancake remainders. It's like fucking rocket science, in breakfast form.
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The wait at Egg Cetera remains appalling (about a half an hour to get a table, followed by another half an hour to get the eggs); by the time the meal arrived, Home Fries and I were both so frickin' famished that we disappeared into the egg zone and, five minutes later, I surveyed my empty plate and remarked, "What just happened?"
Four hugely satisfied eggs out of four.
Egg Cetera is located at 200 Victoria Road South in Guelph, Ontario (a.k.a. "The Goo"). Home Fries is the code-name for my sometime BenChro companion, Rebecca J. Wood. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
I went to the doctor today and learned a few things:
1. I now officially weigh less than 200 pounds. This was the goal, lo those many years (well, a year and a half) ago when I was so stupendously overweight. This brings up an important point I've been wanting to make: for much longer than I've actually been in the process of losing weight, people have been coming up to me and exclaiming at how much weight I've lost. This is because I used to be fat, and probably in peoples' mind's eye, I am still fat. But this begs the question: if I was so fuckin' fat, how come none of you people actually told me I was fat? Fuck. It's all well and good for you to moon about how slender I am now, but jeez, help a brother out when he needs help, not when he's doing fine!
2. I am also now officially a migraine sufferer, which = I have way better drugs now. Rah.
Otherwise I am as fit as a fiddle (and no longer so fuckin' fat!) and with the exception of taking half the blood in my body, the process was painless. I might have a bit of degeneration in the bones of my neck: this is because I am so fuckin' old. But unlike being so fuckin' fat, being so fuckin' old is something absolutely no one has any problem telling me I am.
I spent yesterday learning how to make decisions rapidly, and also how to rapidly assess if you should make a rapid decision, by way of a secondary decision-making process. Yes: this is why the economy is collapsing.
The headache started yesterday at around 3 p.m. and by the time I got into bed at midnight, I actually couldn't lie still. When I left for work it was a railway spike through my left eye, and when I came home from work it had moved over to my right eye. It is impervious to painkillers, reducing only to a dull thrum at the best of times, and even then leaving me like I've been electrocuted and left to cower. I hate this headache. I hate it like a living thing. Now I'm on the couch in my bathrobe watching Deepa Mehta's episode of Young Indiana Jones, and I desperately wish I had some ginger ale.
Let's look at what I can see from here.
1. Here's the Watchmen poster, which I like quite a lot.
2. Here's an interesting (and obviously, highly upsetting) legal case against a person who knowingly infected women with HIV and is now being charged with first-degree murder. I had wondered when something like this would happen, and whether it's legally sustainable.
3. With a hefty SARAFINA DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK, here's the Season Five promo for Lost. Hoooooooooo-cheeeeeeeee mama. That doesn't suck. I'm in quite the Lost frame of mind lately, what with S working her way through season 2 for the first time right now. If we time it out right, we can step into season 4 on DVD in December and then straight into the new season. Though "timing it right" rarely applies with that "play all" button on the Lost DVDs.
4. Finally, the indefatigable Roger Ebert - that man is more and more becoming my personal hero, no matter how many slap-fights he gets into - gets into a big fucking mess about publishing a review after only watching 8 minutes of a movie, here, here, and here. I've done it too, more than once, though I (unlike him) tend to think a walkout is line one of a review, not the punchline, if only because it is as clear a message of a film's worth as any one can conjure in prose. But then, I am not professionally employed in the field, and I am also of somewhat sketchy morals when it comes to signing the practice log. Fascinating discussion and insights, regardless.
Whoa, Indiana Jones just learned about Shiva for the first time. Criminy.
BEST THING EVER.
When I looked at him a minute ago I thought it said "I rip out your heart, Charlie!" which is in a lot of ways even funnier.
I know better than to go into The Labyrinth these days, because I always come out either having spent a hundred dollars, or wanting to. But I stopped by to pick up the new Ex Machina trade because it seems only fair, and
I WANT THIS SO MUCH.
I first got into Benjamin's art a couple of years ago when I was trying to write Snapdragon, but I only ever had tiny digest-sized bandes dessinées to look at. This book is goddamned huge, nice and oversize, every page is a single portrait, and they are heart-achingly gorgeous. And among other things, that guy really knows how to use the colour green. Oh man.
New Ex Machina and me will be in the corner, moping.
A candle won't cut it, brothers: Rudy Ray Moore is dead, and he deserves a whole damn house fire be lit in his honour.
I got into blaxploitation sometime in my second year at York, but I wasn't really a lifelong fan until Rudy Ray Moore had sex with this white woman
got caught by her sheriff husband, ran naked out of the house,
jumped naked off a cliff and had the whole thing played back again in this instant replay.
And THAT, my friends, remains one of my six favourite moments in the history of film.
"That motherfucker think I'm dead, but he don't know: I'm a human tornado!" - Rudy Ray Moore in The Human Tornado
Today, I hiked here:
And took this:
among others which I choose not to post out of sheer laziness.
Matty Price and I oughta do a better job of keeping track of where and when we hike, but in the meantime I will say only that I did not get outdoors nearly enough this year and I am rather disappointed with myself about that, but I guess I can only endeavour to do better next time. Cripes, there's a pool in my building that I haven't even been in yet. It's time for some focus.
D-Coc came over the other night and we went over some obstructions I have set up for myself for new writing projects, and today I started to try doing that old five-pages-a-day thing that worked so spectacularly well for a couple of years there and then started to really, really not work. It seems we are still in the "not work" phase of that, which translated in my journal to a very boldface MY WORDS ARE MUD out of sheer frustration. But who knows, maybe if I get enough gunk out on paper I'll eventually be able to not suck again. Until then, this feels like razorblades.
I am strongly considering giving up coffee, for environmental and personal reasons.
"Oh, fuck you in your black heart." - Me to the internet just now
It happens, and I am sure it has happened to you, that there are people I have known in my life who I might once have thought quite highly of, who I now tend to think of as the worst rank posers, thesaurus-hounds and dilettantes, et mightily cetera. (Don't worry: it's not you.) I think there are very few spots on my "you're in the good books for ever and ever no matter what" books, and they are filled by truly stupendous people, and I do sincerely hope I am not the sort of person who burns through all the other relationships in a few years, as at least one very good friend of mine described one particularly troubling frenemy of ours the other day. (Yes: frenemy.) But inevitably, my brain is neurotic and tends towards now-focused-ness, and sweet holy, give me five minutes and I will come up with something to worry. As this paragraph so deftly proves.
Switching tracks, I think my new expression of frustration or dismay will be "Temple of Doom!" Try it on. It's marvelous. I am also currently fond of such expressions as "top man," am quite glad my beard has finally grown back in, and am looking for opportunities for a bit of on-the-road adventure before the colour is drained completely out of the world. Right now I am sitting in couch-bed, doing some writing, downloading '80s U2 relentlessly from the internet, watching Penelope, and missing the lady, which is a tad greedy under the circumstances, but, I think, still indicates a good thing.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to sit at home and eat tunafish.
SPECIAL! A few weeks ago, Tim asked me to write one of blogTO's Best of Toronto posts - the Eggs Benedict one, of course. Feels a bit like the completion of a life's work, except that obviously I have many, many bennies yet to consume.
The fifteen best benny establishments in the city as voted by the blogTO readership are.... here!
EDIT: The article also appears in the Toronto section of today's National Post, for those who do the "printed news" thing.
And we're out. Thanks for playing everyone!
With what right do they attack him?
Holy moly, it's the Star Treks.
The mythology is building around this thing but now that I'm looking at it I'm becoming less convinced, maybe because it just seems so damn goofy. Who knows, it might be brilliant. Right now though it sorta makes me feel like it's the biggest fan film ever. "Who do we know who looks a lot like Bones?" "Bob, from down at the general store." "Get him a uniform and a haircut!" Are people really gonna be wearing bright red smocks and flying around space in this? Ah, I'm bitching.
I actually wrote a thing earlier this week, just a short dialogue scene between two characters, just a little something I wanted to shoot maybe before the end of the season on my newfangled balcony thinger. It sucks. Oh god does it suck. I got it in my head a little while back that I should start resisting all the usual traps and ticks I lean on when writing anything, try to write something a bit less horrifyingly "me," and what I came out with actually sounds significantly worse, significantly more horrifyingly "me." It's fucking atrocious. I figure now that I should just write the whole thing again, every day from now until I genuinely manage to do it in a way that sounds like an actual movie and not just my usual bullshit. Not look at the previous drafts, not revise; just start again with a blank page every single day, and see if endless spontaneous repetition of page-one rewrites might let me shake loose the horrid voice that infects every single word of every single thing I do. And then, y'know, shoot that thing and write something bigger. I am fairly irritated with myself in the meantime.
Did you know there is a Boss's Day? Today is Boss's Day.
I have been circling a cold for more than a week, and would like either a decisive victory - a majority government, if you will - or for the stupid thing to just land on me and make me really sick for a few days and get it over with. My body is creaky and cranky and not getting enough exercise. And I'm apparently very busy. Frick! I just wanna snuggle and watch Lost.
Did not put the action figure in the photo myself, but appreciate whoever did.
Weak, Canada. Just weak.
Every time I go to vote, I become sharply aware of the fact that our entire democratic system is perched on the edge of the abyss over which we find only chaos. I have never voted in a riding in which I've been registered, except the very first time - I'm an unsettled 30something, I change postal codes like iPhone buyers change email addresses, i.e. frequently and to great concern among the populace. So every time I have to go and vote I need to register at the polling station I'm in, and every single time, I am simply stunned that any dimwit with half an ounce of ambition wouldn't be able to throw this entire electoral system over with a couple pieces of construction paper and some scotch tape.
Yesterday, when I went to register, my voter card was taken by a blind guy. I mean, he was probably a volunteer and god bless him for coming out to help with the process, but he was fucking blind, and his job was to read voter cards. He asked me to read my voter card to him. My card could have said that I was Batman, here to arrest the Penguin, and he still would have assigned me to booth 63.
Well anyways, you get what you pay for. A couple more years of this and we'll get some whackshit Tory splinter parties to split the vote on the right the way it's been split on the left. Until then, the cat-eating space robot rules us like a king. Admit it: you had a look at the markets this morning and were the tiniest bit guilty-glad, weren't you?
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
Nothing satisfies that post-Thanksgiving jeez-my-belly-grew morning hunger like an eggs benedict, so after taking in some fine puppetry at Queen's Quay with Home Fries, we walked up the street to that Cora's that always has a line of people streaming out the door every weekend (or holiday) day. There are three "Eggs Ben et Dictine" at Cora's, and I went for the real killer: the one that substitutes the ham for brie and mushrooms.
Now that's a good idea. I wish they'd named it. Ladeling hollandaise over brie is a bit like complementing chocolate with more chocolate, but there's no denying it's an effective benny, if rich as hell and somewhat frightening from a health perspective. Cora's attempts to defray this guilt with a truly spectacular outlay of fruit alongside the meal, where shaved kiwi beats at the heart of a boat of diced apple and juicy canteloupe.
Home Fries had the regular benny and I tried a bit, and we both agreed that the ideal course for the meal would have been for us to order our respective breakfasts and then swap an egg apiece so that we both ended up with the same quantity of both versions of the meal. The brie benny is a tad too thick to be truly enjoyable as a complete meal, and the ham benny a tad too thin; if Cora's figures out a way to do both on the same plate, they'll be printing money.
Three and a half eggs outta four.
There are Cora'ses all over the place, but the one I went to is on Blue Jays Way in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
Why so early?
Also: A Threevening With Kevin Smith? Really?
There are apparently two things I simply cannot forgive:
While in the list-making mode, the Thanksgiving weekend has made me realize that I left two important signposts off my recent list of things that make you an actual grown-up:
That colour, by the way, was "firebrick." Hex code #800517 for those looking.
Incidentally, my brother tells me some crazy son'bitch out there actually wrapped a turducken (which is actually, by default, a turduckenage, as we explored yesterday) in bacon, thus creating (for all intents and purposes) a bacoturduckenage. Five meats.
Hot Toys Two-Face: not shabby! Neo-Toht with meltyface: not coming! That latter was worth my updating my meagre little Toht fan page from back when the internet had fan pages, for the first time in about eleven years.
Right, so I went to see a puppet show with Rebecca today, which was as decent enough as any a way to spend a holiday Monday. Plus, it's unseasonably warm in T.O. today. I might go for a bike ride back to my old abode, and see if that frickin' crystal skeleton ever showed up. And tonight is all about watching Batman with Mark. Doin' just fine over here.
"Guy rips out the other guy's heart, shows it to him, and tosses him into a fire pit." - Me, explaining to Bex why Temple of Doom continues to have a profound hold on my subconscious
Hey! It's Thanksgiving. The one day of the year (that isn't Christmas) (or my birthday) where I don't just wanna be a carnivore, I wanna prove shit. Be a fundamentalist about the affair. Right now my brain is in a single staccato repeat of "bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird." When word reached my ear of a friend of Sarafina's making a turducken the other day, I wanted to make my way there just to encounter it, just to see what it smells like. I didn't get there. But apparently sausage is involved - apparently "turkducken" is an underexaggeration. It's actually turduckenage. I sort of want to see a turkduckenage take on a tofurkey at some sort of Caligula dinner party. Don't worry: I want to be fair about things. I want that tofurkey to sing tofurkey awesomeness. It's the excess that attracts me, not the culinary philosophical contretemps. And then I just want to see those two balls of opposing gustatorial confection - the height of their respective antithetical branches of a food industry's technological brow - meet each other on a playfield of decadence, to see what happens.
Yesterday napping and last-of-the-season long weekend sunshine was taken to a high art form, and then I drove the sisters DiFelice to B-fo
HOLY SHIT THE DEVIL JUST WALKED IN
THAT'S THE DEVIL
He looks like an average white guy, slightly overweight, could be shopping at a Wal Mart in Pennsylvania, except he has horns and is wandering around the room right now looking out the windows
The devil.
Anyway, - wow, real life intervened there for a second, walked around a Starbucks and threw me off my shit, I'll be right with you -
OK. So I drove the sisters DiFelice to B-fo last night for the long weekend, and I've got my family affairs later today. The place still feels strange when it's just me there alone, kept trying to hug Zam all night while in the throes of listless sleep, but I got up in the morning and embraced bachelorhood, ate Pop Tarts and wrote about action figures and watched the last of season 1 of Californication a little bit high. You know, that show turned faintly tremendous toward the end there, or at least as close to as it's likely to get, because there's no denying I just cared so much when that little whelp stole his manuscript. Perhaps I am sensitive to plagiarism, artistic thievery, and not getting to claim the awesomeness that is yours. (Remember when that kid stole my web site back in '01?) But yeah, those last three episodes or so when suddenly the good guys (Mulder, McElhone, Bendis, and the potty-mouthed and stone-cold-stoned lesbicurious Brazilian waxer Marcy who is, in her way, the funniest character on earth to me right now) were very much a unfocused, disspirited mess, but the bad guys (ho-girl and ho-secretary) were lining up to be all evil and whatnot, and even that stupid Wednesday Adams daughter seems terribly effective all of a sudden and I sorta had to sit on my new grey Ikea couch-that's-a-bed-also and say "Yeah, apparently this works" cuz I'm just so agitated about everything.
And now it's nearly 1 and I would very much like a sandwich, except that I would also like to be hungry later, and I would very much like to be out in the sun reading comics, except that I'd like to write something first and laptops work in sunshine like vampires work in... sunshine. (Shit.) But in the meantime, I am thankful for every single thing in my little life. And gratitude is success.
And yet notwithstanding, I seem to have moved up to a new scale. Scale is the serious problem of my toy collecting life: I got too big. Let's say you've got a desk, in an office where people are. You go to your local hobby shop and see, for example, a Beetlejuice action figure. And you liked Beetlejuice, and you like the action figure, so you purchase same for your desk, and put it there. And the single 7" Michael Keaton toy on your desk adds a certain "je ne sais quoi" that humanizes the place, creates a useful talking point for visitors, and lets you (when in a bad mood) look at Beetlejuice and think, "hey, fuck, that was a funny movie."
Well, imagine you had a lot of movies you liked just about as much as Beetlejuice, and a bunch you liked more, and toy companies figured out that you existed about 7 years ago, and has spent the intervening time making toys of everything. Say you had sloppy impulse control, a middle class white boy's understanding of the value of a dollar, and a bunch of disposeable income. What would you do, Keanu? What would you do?
Well shit.
Not buying toys any more sucks the balls off the world, but having 300 Star Wars figures sucks more. They're just a mass, an aesthetic puddle - none of them mean anything because each of them means something. I do genuinely look at some - well, most - of these little doo-dads and say, that's a kind of art, or as close to as I care to get right now. But frick lord, they stop making any kind of a statement past a certain scale of collection, and that brings up the other matter of scale, wherein the only way to really stand out among a flock of 4-inchers is to be 8-inch, or better 12-inch, higher detail or higher quality or just whatever. This is a tunnel with no end, unless you really concentrate - fill the nerd case to the top, but no higher - yes Joker, maybe Utapau clone, no bad Indy because you know what? No one in the world can sculpt your face. It's okay.
Yeah, there's a wishlist, particularly for Sideshow (though I'd not say no to a Hasbro Bea Arthur, or a Hot Toys Geoffrey Rush); I want to see that Cody, or that Zam, or a Tusken filthy and sandblasted like a nightmare vision of a future in an iron lung. Past a certain point, though, I chumped myself. Only so much room at home or at the office and then it's just the landscape equivalent of white noise - the salt flats in Gerry, the blizzard in House of Flying Daggers. When they can make an action figure of an idea, call me.
It's like this: I have seven dark grey Benno DVD shelves from Ikea, and then they stopped making the colour. They fucked me. They don't care: seven grey and a green, fucking express yourself you clinging commodity-culture wretch. My next shelf will be red. Why? Because I've run out of ways to keep doing the same thing.
For some reason I got it in my head to do a follow-up now-that-I'm-done list of the best of the Star Wars figures, but along the way I realized this would really only be of significance to my brother. So I've created a new Tederick.com category just for him. ADAM!
The best Star Wars figures (modern line) ever made before I gave up the hobby and retreated into the corner like a whipped puppy, in no particular order other than grouping like characters together:
, v2 
Ye photography and linkes all thanks to Rebelscum.com. Still the best, and they've got this.
Gods but Stephen Harper's web site fascinates the shit out of me.
I just stare at it.
For hours. (Well, minutes.)
Time to admit to my nature and charley up to the fact that I am, indeed, so excited about the Matrix blu-ray release this week that I can barely speak when thinking about it. I tried looking at the films again earlier this year and it was the first time my brain clicked over and said "nah, wait for the BD." Those early-in-format standard DVDs (Matrix 1 particularly) are sort of wonderful, laughable relics of the pre-LOTR early days of "what can we do with DVD?" They're chunky, and awkward, and they don't know how to present special features except to know that they want to present a lot of 'em. The Matrix is now the only film I've owned in three formats, which doesn't just beeline nicely into the overall vogue around the film's technology/reality mishmash, but also serves me as a standing, unconscious tribute to those days early in 1999 when me and Steve woudl hijack screening rooms at York while slaving through the Absence cut and just watch the Matrix trailer a few times really loud, back when the majority of our peers were still giving the "Johnny Mnemonic? Fuck that!" line about the flick. Man. Good old days.
I've also got Kingdom of the Crystal Skull coming, which I kinda regret before it's even arrived, and I'm still crimping and saving to be able to get When We Left Earth, which basically looks like Planet Earth for NASA.
Anyways, it's too nice a day to sit around blogging about shit. Go enjoy the October! (season, not revolution)
My friend and comic book guru, Sean, is not someone whose advice I should easily dismiss: every time he turns me onto a book, I end up loving it. He recently fished me back onto the Boys bandwagon after my suicidal plunge into pull-list decimation, and a few months ago he also put the second or third issue of Kick-Ass in my hands. In the case of the latter, I took one look at the Romita nastiness and said "no thank you," but I was foolish. All that shit you've been hearing about Kick-Ass? 'Tis true. The book kicks ass. I finally got into it this week and downed issues 1-4 in rapid succession; I'm even starting to like the art in spite of myself. Jury's still out on Matthew Vaughn's career, but it doesn't take a genius to see that this will make one hell of a fucking movie, if they can keep the violence and gangster-skewering superchildren intact. I was about three pages into issue 3 when I mumbled "This is gonna be the next Fight Club."
Speaking of Fight Club, here's Whack the PM, where you get to hit our country's leaders until they stop being so annoying, thereby consolidating your voting choice. Unsurprisdingly, I only ended up hitting Harper.
This photo mural, purloined from blogTO, actually pretty much says everything you need to know about the candidates:
Stéphane Dion: Rolling up his sleeves to look like he wants to work hard.
Stephen Harper: OH MY GOD HE'S GOING TO EAT THE CAT
Jack Layton: A man's man; a ladies man; in every way: a man.
Elizabeth May: I AM SO FUCKING HAPPY TO BE HERE
Gilles Duceppe: Not pictured.
I'm in kind of a dead riding anyway, because I have no Tory candidate at all. No matter who I vote for, the Tories don't win; Bob Rae wins, which doesn't make me feel stupendously better, but I guess it's better than nothing. I have a Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party of Canada candidate, though. Who knew? BEARS RULE!
Meanwhile: turkey!
A tiny, vicious-looking miniature helicopter would go nicely with my trebuchet, don't you think? I could send out sorties into the rest of the office, lure enemies back to my desk with the promise of RC helicopterin' fun, and then hit them with a fusillade of trebuchet-flung hellfire. But I don't trust ThinkGeek any more, not since the Venus Flytrap incident of 2006, which was admittedly my own fault for thinking that the climate in Toronto was somehow equivalent to that of Buenos Aires, but I blame ThinkGeek nevertheless. Because I'm a dork.
Sarafina and I took a lap around the Spaced block last night, with delicious foods to go along with, and she's also working her way through the first season of Lost rather ravenously, which has made me want to go back and watch the whole thing all over again, or at least get to December quickly so I can watch Season 4 when it comes out on the DVD. The dino-natives are restless.
Television programs I apparently no longer watch:
Television programs I continue to watch in spite of myself:
Thus returning us to my long-held, little-believed assertion that I don't watch TV any more.
That's me.
Yeah, I used to own the Palisades Mr. Brown from many a moon ago (back when there was a Palisades Toys, of course), but Zam pretty much destroyed mine over the past few years. I found a replacement at a stupendous bargain on Ebay last week, so Quentin Tarantino is pointing a gun at me once again. It used to force me to write; now, at least, it keeps me honest.
Hey speaking of fun shit you can do with shit, here's a woman dressed up as a Cookie Monster Slayer. Now, if it was me, that would not be red blood on the stake - it would be either bright blue, or uncooked cookie dough with chunks of blue fur sticking out of it. (Probably the latter.) Me, I always liked Telly. I think there should be Telly action figures. I think Telly and Mr. Brown would look quite good together, actually, and if you stick General Madine in there, you pretty much seal the deal.
Today was the day I got everything in the mail that was supposed to come to me, over the past five weeks. All at once. Most important of all was the replacement for my camcorder adapter, because somehow in the moving shuffle I actually lost the old one. I thought that only happened on TV, but it made me feel stupendously stupid and impotent nonetheless, and reminded me rather violently of my responsibilities to myself on a creative level. Nonetheless, although I do not feel very well today (physically), I (otherwise) feel full and wonderful and very, very thankful. (Hey, five days early!) So that's good. Fall's a good time to do a thing.
"Personality-wise, Telly is a fidgeting, nervous wreck, prone easily to manic behavior and paranoia."
I am not particularly concerned for the safety of my job, although one must of course be continuously aware in today's economic climate that if one works for a large corporation (I do), it is at least within the realm of possibility that your indefatigable, we-make-toilet-paper-and-everybody-needs-toilet-paper job might become irrelevant with little or no warning. Like I said, I'm not too concerned about my current state of employ, but darkening financial times do bring out the paranoiac in people. Unrelatedly, I was reading Joey's blog (you know him as The Accordion Guy) - he worked with Jason and I on a project or two back in the Bearshark days, and of course he's enough of a Toronto fixture now for me to keep an eye on him on a semi-regular. He got laid off recently - not fired, laid off, the sort of thing that is probably going to infiltrate the web development industry rather spectacularly over the next 18 months or so, because as Sarafina pointed out the other day, if the end of the world came, what are we actually able to contribute? - and he's been writing about the job-loss, and I just wanted to say that if you're feeling at all precarious about your career right now, this entry will make you feel better. It's lovely. I mean, it might also make you feel worse, what with the step-by-step description of the laying-off process. But I promise, at the end, it will also make you feel better.
Hey Canada: you're voting in 7 days. What I would like, at this point, is a complete game change in Canadian politics, because the obvious reality is that this election has become The People Who Don't Want Stephen Harper Any More vs. The People Who Do, and if it were actually taken on those terms we would win by a fucking landslide, but instead we will be forced to endure a CRAP minority and directionless government in the midst of perhaps the greatest economic shitstorm my generation will ever see. That is fucking bad, man. Now would be a superb time for a would-be despot to do his thing.
Well, it's that time of year again, the time I become desperately nostalgic for the days of making movies when I was a teenager, back when making movies was a) fun and b) something I did. Y'know, Mark and Adam and Ryan and Caitlin and I made the third stab at Four Royal Flushes ten damn years ago this weekend. Ruttin' Thanksgiving... makes me all shivery. I often miss making movies, but more even than that, I miss making movies as a teenager, which is an entirely different order of experience for me and much more precious. Time to dig a few things out of storage and see if I can't actually make lasting digital copies of the fucking things this time around, in lieu of anything else...
Y'know, for a long time I blamed York for quashing whatever arrogant glee I used to have around spending my weekends shooting flicks in the back yard with Mark, but I think York really just existed around a life change, rather than causing one. At some point, everyone abandons grace for knowledge. And knowledge is a real kick in the pants in terms of that joyous, spontaneous expurgation of self into creativity. Not to lean too heavily on someone else's metaphor, but I used to be able to find my way down ladders in the dark. Now I have to think my way through every single step. But, taken another way, the things I get to do now are endlessly more interesting and enriching than the dumb shit I did back then. I miss the process a lot more than the outcome.
Saying of which, I finished Once Upon a Time in the North, and wanted to do very little once it was done besides sit on the train and look out the window. So I would say any book capable of doing that is a book worth reading, even if it was slight. Some things happened today and over the weekend which made me realize (as though it needed realizing) that I am quite good where I am, right now. Not that I crave stagnation or expect no change, simply that this is a good place, or better yet a good process, and I am goiing to continue on with it and see what does come next.
At Sarafina's suggestion I put Jabba on the fridge, which was something that had been kicking the back of my mind anyway, and thus turned a large and unwieldy collectible I was seriously considering getting rid of, into the best thing about my house. Jabba on the fridge: pop art, cautionary tale, or just good decorating? A bit of all three, I think.
I spent the afternoon making chili and watching The Godfather. 
The long, long, long, (long) delayed Mamo where we recap our summer has finally been posted here, and I presume it will be amusing. Hey, now would be a great time for you to join our Facebook group if you haven't already. Just Facebook for "Mamo" and I presume the rest takes care of itself.
Nuit Blanche 2008? = teh suck. Proved an apt opportunity, however, for me to watch Sarafina and Demetre free-associate alternate art pieces which would have been wholesale more enjoyable than anything on display last night. Dancing fat guys factor frequently, at least to Demetre, in terms of rescuing existing exhibits from their suckness. Me, I just keep drifting back to Plo Wars, even though I don't entirely "own" the idea. Does anyone have a couple hundred Plo Koons lying around?
Looks like Warner is indeed reading a Lord of the Rings trilogy blu-ray for release next year, which seems about right in terms of my mounting desire to watch the flicks again (and here's the dancing fat guy!). Would be nice, what with the Hobbit imminent and Lovely Bones finally seeing release next fall; I miss me the Peej. In the meantime, I am in a fine swiss pickle over the Godfather blu-ray series. This is a classic example of what not to do in a format upgrade quandary: classic films that I love but watch infrequently, that look "all right" on standard DVD but not great, and fuck me if that new box set ain't expensive. Criminy.
What we did not realize until recently was that quietly growing in Sarafina's back yard over the course of the summer, deceptively coy in their cheerful redness, were in fact the Insanity Peppers of Quetzlzacatenango, which are nominally grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum. We bought the seeds at the Party Farms near her house. Who knew? Suddenly bereft of my Thursday night plans I decided to make tacos, tossed in a single such insanity pepper because I've yet to find suitable chili flakes at a grocery store near my house, and found the resulting taco stuffing virtually inedible due to its extraordinary, tongue-flaying heat. Gulping spoonfuls of plain yogourt I was able to survive, but it was a harrowing ordeal. I made it through the third episode of True Blood and the sixth of Californication, and then passed out, as high as a Christmas-tree pie.
Neither series, incidentally, is what I would call "good." The former is turning into a guiltily enjoyable trash novel (kind of a Southern Gothic Melrose Place with fangs) and the latter is just some sweet pimpin' Duchovny porn (ironic, no?), so it's not like I'm not rabidly enjoying them; just that my enjoyment comes with snide attitude and above-it-all arrogance. As it should.
Once Upon a Time in the North is making me ache quite a bit, but otherwise I'm enthusiastically adoring it; it was exactly what I needed, being an adventure story featuring cowboys and bears. Cowboys are dead interesting when transplanted into unfamiliar climes. (And re: young Lee Scoresby, I have but two words: Nathan. Fillion.) I'm on page 50 and doing my best not to run through the whole thing at a gallop, but so far it's my favourite book of the year. I suppose that wasn't surprising.
It is chilly as a son'bitch in Toronto, and Nuit Blanche is tomorrow night. This year's philosophy is "pick a zone, stick to that zone." But which zone?
I've just been playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and... uh... was this thing approved by all the right people? I'm an hour into the game and the best words to describe it would be "killing frenzy," "murdering spree," and/or "Jedi: Blood Lust." Kinda awesome if you're in the mood to storm through various Star Wars landscapes going ten different kinds of kill-crazy on old favourites like Wookiees, rebel fleet troopers, and astromech droids, but a bit disturbing once you realize that each and every moment of your existence is defined by how much wholesale slaughter you can bring to a particular environment. Sure, if I were hackin' away at zombies, I'd have nary a problemo. But there's something about Chewbacca death-cries that gets under my skin a bit.
I have picked up rather a fondness for electrocuting people, though.
Hey, while we're on the subject of the stupendously entertaining, go to Facebook, go to the bottom of the page, and where it says "English," switch it to "English (Pirate)". Literally laughed myself sick for my entire lunch hour. Still laughing, a bit, when I see the status update box say "What arrrrrrrh ye doin'?", Geoffrey Rush style.
And speaking of pirates, I can now watch my piratebayed TV episodes on my actual television set. It's like I'm living in the future! If the future was all pixeled out and gross, and took days upon days to download.
Well, it's the first of October, and I have a Dark Materials hurt on like you would not believe. If I'm not careful, I'm going to end up one of those Christopher Lee types who read the book every single year, like clockwork. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just that it would get in the way of all the other stuff I want to read. Fortunately, I bought that Scoresby/Iorek book over the summer and felt it was far too warm out to read it, so perhaps I will read it now. I hope it tastes right. In the meantime I am reading Who Killed Retro Girl? and enjoying it quite a lot.
Hey look, the Right Honourable Evil Space Robot Stephen Harper's Evil Space Speechwriter is apologizing for plagiarizing someone else's work like a third-grader with an essay on peregrine falcons due the next day, when what he should really be apologizing for is peeling back the lie that is marketing-driven politics in the 21st century and thereby freaking out the stiffs. I am so phenomenally uninterested in Harper and his jive that the news on this story didn't even really factor for me, but I must admit to feeling somewhat generally more ornery this time round than I was last time. I blame atheism. I feel underrepresented in the House. Just think - there's at least a game possibility that an African-American is about to become POTUS (which suggests that by early February, asteroids are going to come hurtling towards the Earth!), but I'd put as good as fifty years between us and the first time a major candidate in either the U.S. or Canada is going to have the stones (or the backing) to stand a chance at election on an admission of "I do not believe in the Christian god." Thanks to that rat Bill Maher, I am suddenly rather anxious about arsenals of nuclear destruction resting in the hands of religious fundamentalists, or the environmental catastrophe of the global industrial complex being governed by people who literally believe that 4,000 years ago, God gave us a whuppin' when we tried to think for ourselves. Sigh. Is there a way out of this one with a modicum of grace? Not that I mind spending the weeknights talking freedom and responsibility with Mark on the streets of downtown Toronto when we were supposed to be talking about girls, but I could do with a few days of no news about murder and sexual violence and the end of the world. There's all those pretty ideas to think about.